Visual Studio 14 CTP and Entity Framework

Visual Studio 14 CTP was made available today, see the announcement post on the Visual Studio blog for more details. This post covers the places that Entity Framework is included in the release and some limitations to be aware of when using it.

Entity Framework Tools

As with past versions of Visual Studio, the Entity Framework Tools are included in-the-box. These tools are capable of working with models created with all versions of Entity Framework up to and including EF6.x.

Visual Studio 14 CTP includes an older build of the EF6 tooling which does not include the bug fixes and improvements from the 6.1.0 and 6.1.1 releases. Future previews of Visual Studio 14 will be updated to the latest version of the tooling.

At this stage, there isn’t a version of the 6.1.0 or 6.1.1 tooling that can be installed on Visual Studio 14.

Entity Framework 6 Runtime

An older build of the EF6 runtime is included in a number of places in Visual Studio 14 CTP. This build does not include the bug fixes and improvements from the 6.1.0 and 6.1.1 releases.

The runtime will be installed if you create a new model using the Entity Framework Tools in a project that does not already have the EF runtime installed.

The runtime is pre-installed in new ASP.NET projects, depending on the project template you select.

We recommend using NuGet to update to the latest version of the runtime. At the time of writing 6.1.0 was the latest stable release and 6.1.1-beta1 was available. For detailed information on how to upgrade, see Updating a Package in the NuGet documentation.

This build of EF7 only implements very basic functionality and there are a number of limitations with the features that are implemented. Please bear in mind that this preview is designed to give you an idea of what the experience will be like and you will quickly hit limitations if you deviate from the code from the default project template.

The EF7 code base is still in the very early stages of development, but if you want to experiment with a build we would recommend visiting our GitHub wiki for information on using nightly builds. Just remember that there are lots of things that don’t work… seriously… we warned you :)!

Oh, happy day! Testing this stuff already on main machine, everything's fine so far (Windows 7). But I have a question…

How "basic" is this preview of EF 7? Let's say, I have an ASP.NET vNext project that has an ODM with 7 entities and three kinds of relationships (zero-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many). I have also implemented some inheritance (according to recomedations seen in Chapter 11 of Contoso University tutorial). Will I run into any sort of problems building this project with VS 14 and then publishing it to Intranet of my organization?

@Constantine – The preview of EF7 is very very early. For example, much of the relationship behavior isn't implemented as yet (i.e. if you change an FK then the reference properties won't update etc.). It is definitely not ready to deploy anything that would be used by end users (that applies to ASP.NET vNext as well).

Will Entity Framework 7 include the equivalent of SqlCredential for the Entity Framework DbConnection. Especially important when using Sql Azure where user id and password are needed and appear as plain text on the local pc.

@David: We are not likely going to try to abstract a specialized authentication mechanism such as SqlCredential. Instead, you can expect EF to allow using SqlCredential when connecting to SQL Server through a SqlConnection.